Automotive
We keep you rolling
No testing company equals QA Consultants’ experience and passion for the Automotive space. We simply love testing the software that ‘drives’ cars. Since 2001, we have worked with over a dozen automobile brands. This includes testing software systems for sales, marketing, service, parts, new product announcements, connected vehicle technologies and autonomous vehicles. We have implemented global content management systems, launched international websites, automated CVT testing and have built a solid reputation for delivering on time and budget. Our goal is to ensure that drivers have the ultimate user experience when in their vehicles and interacting with the OEM.
QA Consultants has established a partnership with the Automotive Centre of Excellence (ACE) at the Ontario Tech University to provide automotive software systems testing. This union is integrated with the physical automotive environmental testing that ACE provides eight major OEMs in North America and to OEMs in Japan and China. ACE is the world’s leading facility for sophisticated intensive physical testing of vehicles.
This partnership provides a comprehensive testing environment for both physical and software system testing of vehicles. Further to this initiative, QA Consultants is leading a two-year program to build comprehensive software system testing environments for connected and autonomous vehicles. Efforts will be focused on testing applications built to interoperate with the Blackberry QNX operating system or with the Automotive Grade Linus (AGL) environments representing 80% of vehicle operating systems globally. Software testing will be conducted on the infotainment clusters driven by Apple Car Play, Google Android Auto, proprietary systems, and software compliance with ISO 26262 that has multiple ASIL requirements
Our comprehensive experience and testing methodologies ensure that drivers have the ultimate user experience when in their vehicles, buying cars, getting them serviced and enjoying their interactions with the vehicle dealer and manufacturer.
To increase QA Consultants’ automotive knowledge base, we’ve partnered with XIVT (pronounced SHIFT). The XIVT project is an international collaboration between Sweden, Germany, Turkey, Portugal and Canada. The project will define a method and toolchain for testing highly configurable, variant-rich embedded systems in the automotive, rail, telecommunication and industrial production domains. This will enable highly effective, cost-efficient quality assurance, allowing the shift to autonomous, flexible and adaptive applications. The method is founded on a knowledge-based analysis of requirements formulated in natural language, and a model-based test generation at a product-line level. It is expected that XIVT methods will result in higher test coverage, more flexible processes of higher quality and better products.
The research project XIVT is a collaborative project between universities, research institutes, companies and technology suppliers from five different countries. The project is financed by the companies involved in the project and research funding agencies. QA Consultants is the Canadian Coordinator for this project.
As a result of great minds coming together, XIVT has produced a report to summarize state of the art requirements-based variability modelling and abstract test case generation. It describes various formalisms which have been described in the literature for feature modelling and the modelling of variability and present methods for the generation of abstract test cases from various informal, semi-formal and formal description techniques. Finally, the report elaborates on available industrial and academic tools both for variability modelling and model-based test generation.
Summary:
The report presents a survey of variability modelling and abstract test case generation approaches for software projects. Feature modelling is introduced as the common denominator among variability modelling techniques, which differ in notation (e.g. UML, XML) as well as in support for hierarchical structures, constraints on feature combinations, representation of variation points and other semantic characteristics. In contrast, abstract test generation methods are distinguished by inputs, which may be source code, requirement specifications, informal notation or natural language, UML diagrams, etc.; how are tests generated, either statically via input manipulation (which may involve Machine Learning or Natural Language Processing) or dynamically through model execution; and whether test suites can run automatically or must be performed manually. It is noted there are remarkably few available references on test generation processes for highly-variant and configurable systems. The report concludes with a review of tools for variability modelling and system testing.
Read the latest XIVT State-of-the-art report on requirements-based variability modelling and abstract test case generation.
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
QA Consultants is very proud to announce the official opening of our Software Test Bay, in partnership with the Ontario Tech University. This space will be outfitted with equipment to test automotive infotainment systems as well as various autonomous vehicle software.
With over 3,000 attendees and 175+ exhibitors, QA Consultants asked the question, “Why is software testing important?” We spoke to a variety of innovative companies, some focusing on autonomous/connected vehicles, who are excited to push the boundaries of technology.
Raed Kadri, Director of Automotive Technology and Mobility Innovation of Ontario Centres of Excellence, sat down with Peter Watkins, COO of QA Consultants, to discuss the exciting future of testing connected vehicles in Ontario with ACE Climatic Wind Tunnel in our Software Test Lab.
Listen to COO, Peter Watkins, explain the XIVT project, QA Consultants’ role as the Canadian Coordinator, and how we’re pushing the envelope when it comes to autonomous and connected vehicle testing.
A sample of our automotive clients:
